Articles

It’s been a decade since the Old Fire raged through the San Bernardino Mountains, incinerating the community of Cedar Glen, leaving nothing but concrete foundations and ghostly chimneys in the drifting acrid smoke.

Claremont residents Lance Kaggie, John Campbell and Charles Job put together their water hoses to create a larger one to battle back flames they believed would have destroyed their homes on Moab Street.

The Old Fire raged toward Highway 18 near Running Springs in the San Bernardino Mountains. Firefighters ran down the highway yelling, “Get out! Get out!” to print and television reporters as the fire began to jump the highway.

FONTANA >> Oct. 21, 2003, was not a good day to be riding dirt bikes or smoking cigarettes in hot, dry, rural areas. More than five years of drought had dried up the swaths of chaparral, creosote and other vegetation blanketing the San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountains and valley floor, so much so that a single spark from a motorcyce engine or a burning cigarette could ignite a wildfire of potential deadly force.

Even though it’s been a decade, the great battle to protect Rancho Cucamonga from the Grand Prix Fire remains fresh in the minds of frontline firefighters. The fire was the largest fire to directly affect city in its history.

Ten years after the Grand Prix Fire took his hillside house in San Antonio Heights, Ken Petschow still has plans to rebuild. But he’s already rebuilt a tradition. Despite no longer having a home on the property, Petschow has continued a nearly 55-year Christmas ritual of lighting the 75-foot-high star that shines above the unincorporated community overlooking the inland valley.

It was two months to the day after the Old Fire charred areas in the San Bernardino mountains and foothills that torrential rain caused disastrous mudslides in the same area, killing more than a dozen people.

After seven days of hell battling two fires that burned more than 70,000 acres, San Bernardino County fire Battalion Chief Chris Norton was ready for some hard-earned rest. His strike team was worn and weary, fighting first a fire in Reche Canyon in Riverside County, then a second, the Grand Prix Fire, in western San Bernardino County, in October 2003.

A decade after one of the worst wildfires in California history, firefighters are bracing for yet another — potentially even more devastating — inferno this year. “Conditions are worse than they’ve been in many, many years,” said Los Angeles County Fire Department Deputy Chief John Tripp, looking out at a vast expanse of parched chaparral in Malibu.

In October 2003, while the Old Fire raged through the San Bernardino Mountains, Crestline resident Michael Daniels “Dan” Pickel, then 27, refused to evacuate. Instead he chose to remain in the smoke-choked forest and help embattled firefighters.

In October 2003, Pat Burns was evacuating neighborhoods threatened by the Old and Grand Prix fires when he got the call himself. Burns, a San Antonio Heights resident, was a search-and-rescue volunteer and a reserve deputy with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department.

For Sue Andrews the experience of a tornado, hurricane and earthquakes don’t come close to the fire that almost took the life of her home 10 years ago. “You could hear that fire coming,” Andrews said of the Grand Prix Fire.

When the Old Fire turned Catherine Adkins’ home into a pile of rubble, she immersed herself in classwork and sports at Pacific High School to get through the trauma. She didn’t cry until about a month later.

Justice didn’t come quickly for victims of the 2003 Old Fire. But it did eventually come — 10 years later. Rickie Lee Fowler, who was serving time at Salinas Valley State Prison for burglary, was charged in 2009 with five counts of murder and two counts of arson related to San Bernardino County’s most devastating wildfire.